This week I’m reading The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan and Amongst Our Weapons by Ben Aaronovitch, and what initially looked like another completely mismatched pair has turned out to have a surprisingly obvious connection: both have me thinking about the ways history accumulates beneath the present.

The Silk Roads is exactly the sort of history that appeals to the part of my brain that wants to pull back from individual events and look at the connections between them. Frankopan shifts the geographical centre of the familiar historical narrative eastwards, following the routes along which goods, people, religions, ideas, diseases and power moved for centuries.

As a historian, I find that question of perspective particularly interesting. Change the point from which you tell a story and suddenly events you thought you understood can look very different. I’m interested not just in the history Frankopan is covering, but in the framework he’s using to organise it – what becomes more important when the traditional Western European centre of gravity is moved elsewhere, and what connections become visible as a result.

Then, at the considerably more local end of the scale, I’m back in London with Amongst Our Weapons.

I’m well into the Rivers of London series by this point, and one of the things I continue to enjoy about Ben Aaronovitch’s world is how thoroughly its magic is embedded in place. Peter Grant doesn’t inhabit a generic magical city that happens to be called London. His London has accumulated. Roman London, medieval London, Victorian London and the modern city all sit on top of and alongside one another, and the supernatural elements feel like another layer of that same history.

Peter’s combination of curiosity, methodical investigation and tendency to become fascinated by extremely specific bits of architecture, infrastructure and local history continues to be enormously appealing to me. Give me a magical mystery and then interrupt it for an unexpectedly detailed explanation of a building and apparently I am very happy.

So despite one book spanning continents and centuries while the other follows a magical policeman around London, this week’s accidental theme seems to be connections.

Trade routes connect places. Cities connect generations. Stories connect past and present. And neither book treats history as something neatly finished and left behind.

It’s still moving underneath everything.

This week’s vibe: following the threads of history from ancient trade routes to magical modern London.